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“Blessed with the gift to gab,” Fox Chicago News morning anchor, Darlene Hill, says that the journalist bug bit her in the early 1980s during her middle school days.
Born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, this small town girl had big dreams for her life.
Hill says that there were only a couple of other African-American women in her journalism classes at The Ohio State University.
“Professors favored the skinny, blonde, Caucasian students in the classroom. They made it a point of pointing out, if you’re not this big, if you don’t have hair like this, if you don’t have features like this, it may be tough for you to get into the business, to stay in the business.”
From then on, she knew that the career she had chosen was going to be a tough journey.
She recalls growing up, watching one particular African-American female news anchor on ABC. For her, this was another inclination that her dreams were valid.
“She was so powerful and so eloquent and so classy and it was the No. 1 station. It was amazing for me to be able to look at someone, who looked like me, doing what I wanted to do.”
Hill says that as a journalist, she knew once that door was opened up, she was here to stay. She has done exactly what she set out to achieve.
Three weeks after graduating from The Ohio State University, she was offered a position as a reporter in Monterey, California. Working for a CBS affiliate, she had to haul a huge camera, write, edit and report the story.
“I learned so much, it taught me to persevere and to never give up.”
Hill still stands by those words today and has yet to let any newsroom see her sweat.
She learned early on, being the only black woman in the newsroom, in Monterey, California, that she had a responsibility as a journalist to tell the story and be fair about it.
Today, this little black girl from Toledo, Ohio has won numerous regional and national awards working in Chicago.
This includes the prestigious Peabody Award she won for the historic story she reported on a high school junior student, who was beaten to death just blocks from his school.
This case got national attention and Hill was able to get her hands on the video recording shot from a student’s cellular phone.
She says at times it has been a little tough to get the story because of being a woman, not necessarily because of the color of her skin.
“I go in and offer my condolences. Give me a reason to get in, other than just as a reporter and I’m going to tell your story.”
Having this mentality has allowed Hill to report every beat of the news, from the Democratic National Convention, to the 2008 Presidential Inauguration in Washington DC and throughout most neighborhoods across the city and through the suburbs of Chicago.
Whether she’s interviewing the President of The United States of America, which she has on several occasions, or the mother of a child that was fatally killed, she knows one thing for sure.
“At the end of the day, while it’s a two minute news story for me, it’s the rest of your life.”
The History of African-American Women In Media 